John Malkovich has played psychopaths, poets, puppets, and whatever the hell he was doing in Con Air, but The New Look drops him into a quieter kind of menace — Nazi-occupied Paris, where survival wasn’t as important so much as a daily negotiation. He shows up here as Lucien Lelong, the couturier who didn’t design much himself but still held the keys to the kingdom, a man whose taste — and talent for appeasement — kept French fashion from getting shipped off to Berlin like confiscated art.
“He was a great recognizer of talent,” Malkovich tells me. Dior, Balmain, Balenciaga — in the 1940s, they all came through Lelong’s doors like students reporting to the headmaster. “He fostered these talents,” he says, “and he was really the person responsible for being able to appease the Nazis… to keep the fashion business from being forced to move from its seat in Paris to Berlin.” No big deal, just a whole culture, avoided exile because one guy knew how to nod convincingly in the direction of fascists.
Malkovich plays him with the sort of moral fatigue you don’t get from reading history books. Lelong has to choose between ideals and existence, over and over, and Malkovich is fascinated by how repulsively relatable that is. “People made accommodations for their lives to go on,” he says. “And of course, those are accommodations that pursuant generations judge very harshly.” His voice goes wry. “This generation of moralists would fare no better. I’m pretty sure they’d fare worse.”
You can almost hear him raise an eyebrow.
If The New Look works — and it does, beautifully — it’s because it refuses the easy version of history. Dior isn’t just a designer; he’s a man trying to stay alive. Chanel isn’t just a legend; she’s a complicated opportunist. And Lelong? He’s the hinge between brilliance and survival, placing bets on the future while Nazis knock on the door. “Very, very few things are really black and white,” Malkovich says. “Life is corruption and life is compromise. That’s a fact.”
When I bring up the haunted look in his eyes during a scene involving tiny fashion-doll prototypes — the kind of moment that distills hopelessness and hope into one weirdly tender gesture — he cuts straight to the point. “It’s creation,” he says. “If people occupied themselves with that, there’d be a lot less mayhem in the world.”
Malkovich, it turns out, is a creation absolutist. He talks about it like some talk about religion. “It’s both life affirming and arguably life-saving,” he says, the closest he gets to pitching a self-help mantra. “Some people aren’t drawn to it, but that could be a number of factors… changeable, adaptable, or curable.”
Creation as cure — coming from a man who’s played assassins and lunatics — lands with unexpected grace.
Of course, you can’t interview Malkovich without wandering into the filmography minefield. I mention Ripley’s Game, his ice-cold turn as Patricia Highsmith’s most elegant sociopath, and he perks up. “I just have a tiny thing in the new one,” he says of Netflix’s upcoming Ripley series with Andrew Scott. “I hope it comes out. It’s been a while. I don’t know what’s going on with that.”
Then he slips back into mentor mode, Lelong-style. “The young actor who plays Ripley is terrific,” he says. “A great Ripley, it looked to me.”
That’s the funny thing about Malkovich: even when he’s playing someone tortured, compromised, or ethically eroding, he seems oddly at peace with the mess of human nature. “Most people don’t love their jobs,” he says. “Most people don’t love their siblings… or their lot in life. And we make accommodation with it.” It isn’t optimism. It’s a kind of shrugging philosophy: we compromise because we’re alive, we create because we have to, and we judge because we think we’d do better — though we wouldn’t.
And as with most Malkovich roles, the line sticks: creation keeps the lights on, but compromise keeps the building standing. Neither is clean. Both are human. And somewhere in the middle sits Lucien Lelong, holding Paris together with taste and diplomacy, waiting for history to remember him.
It finally has.
Watch the interview above and then check out the trailer below.
